Tonight is one of those multi-show nights. So Percussion opens for Matmos (Pitchfork review of their new album here) at 7, followed by the CSO at 8. Report to follow. And since I've been called out, I'll report as well on Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing.

October 03, 2006

Critics tend to pay more attention to composers than to performers. (I anticipate denials of this claim from both camps.) So while you may have heard that today is Steve Reich's 70th birthday and last September 25 was Shostakovich's 100th, another important day passed with no fanfare whatsoever.

Glenn Gould would have been 74 on September 25. I normally view counterfactual history as an empty mental gesture, since, for example, the Warsaw Uprising did fail and trying to understand what followed from it is more important than imagining what might have happened had it succeeded. But what would a musical world look like with Gould still alive? Brendel is still performing, ditto Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Maurizio Pollini, and Krystian Zimerman, and a host of newcomers has arrived since his death 24 years ago.

Granted, Gould stopped performing live in 1964. But would Lang Lang's indulgences seem so out-of-place if Gould had recorded another Goldberg Variations disc even slower than his 1981 recording? Would Piotr Anderszewski's storming out of the Leeds Competition seem so outlandish if Gould was still issuing bizarre pronouncements from his Toronto bunker?

What about the early-music movement? Gould recorded a bit on harpsichord, but imagine what might have happened if he had truly drank the Kool-Aid and stopped using the piano. The defenders of the Bach on the modern grand piano, Andras Schiff above all, would have lost a powerful, visible ally.

Ultimately, a world with Gould is preferable to one without him. A wan, bland assertion, yes. But when was the last time you were so irritated by a recording that it forced you to listen to it again, and dissect just why you hated it so much? And as you listened to it, in the background as you were reading, with headphones on as you followed every phrase, you came to realize that, however wrongheaded it seemed, you found that you didn't distrust it so much. Now you thought that the piece couldn't be played any other way. After writing that, his absence seems even greater.